African Atrocity, American Humanity

Slavery and Its Transnational Afterlives

Datos Bibliográficos

ID9250396
AutoresYogita Goyal (0000-0002-5248-3513, University of California, Los Angeles, autor de correspondencia), Goyal Goyal
Año2014
Volumen45
Número3
Páginas48
Fecha de publicación2014-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaResearch in African Literatures (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0034-5210 • E-ISSN: 1527-2044
EditorialIndiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2979/reseafrilite.45.3.48
OpenAlexW2078113497
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas6
Referencias citadas31

This essay argues that contemporary American conceptions of African atrocity are haunted by the specter of slavery, which structures the ways in which a relation between the United States and Africa is imagined. Francis Bok's memoir, Escape from Slavery (2003), and Dave Eggers's novel What Is the What (2006) reveal the stakes of this literary haunting, where the canonical Atlantic genre of the antebellum slave narrative is called into play to narrate contemporary Sudanese stories, thus refashioning the politics of race and diaspora for a neoliberal age. Reading for the formal and ideological exchanges between subject, author, and amanuensis, the essay shows how the discourse of modern slavery relies on sentimental humanism to generate a seemingly new way for Americans to imagine themselves as global citizens, constituting themselves as global via their humanitarian empathy for the African victim of atrocity

Crimes against humanity · Criminology · Humanity · International law · Political science · Sociology · War crime · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society